After announcing he was stepping down as Speaker of the House in 2015 by singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” John Boehner, the Ohio Republican, sat down with a handful of reporters in his Capitol Hill office for an exit interview on the eve of his resignation from Congress as a man unburdened. Later, out of office, he was blunter, describing to Politico the difficulty of bargaining with President Barack Obama while unable to promise the votes of his own conference: “It’s hard to negotiate when you’re standing there naked.” Boehner’s successors have done little to disprove his assessment. Paul Ryan faced the threat of removal by the conservative wing of his caucus before Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterms.
When the party retook the chamber in 2022, Kevin McCarthy needed 15 ballots to win the gavel in January 2023, only to find himself in the unenviable position of overpromising and underdelivering in the eyes of his most ideological members. To secure their votes, he handed them the keys to his ouster. His speakership lasted just 269 days before eight Republicans joined Democrats to remove, for the first time ever, a speaker by a vote of the House.
During the 15 rounds of roll call votes it took for McCarthy to win the gavel, Jeffries’ name was spoken over 3,000 times on the House floor, while every Democrat voted for their own leader and fragmented Republicans voted for several candidates. After McCarthy’s removal, it took the House GOP three weeks and four nominees to decide on their current speaker, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Should the midterm elections follow forecasters’ projections and give Democrats a House majority, Jeffries is poised to become the first Black American to hold the role of House speaker in the history of the republic.
However, making history may not be enough to head off the kinds of intra-party frictions with his own party’s ideological extremes that his Republican predecessors have faced. The energy came from outside Washington: rallies, talk radio, insurgent primary challengers who ran against “the establishment” as much as they did against Democrats. By 2015, the most committed members had organized themselves into the House Freedom Caucus, roughly 40 strong and, crucially, large enough to be pivotal in any Republican speaker race.
The Democratic majority now taking shape has a familiar look. Its energy, too, is coming from outside the Beltway: from DSA organizers, whose movement elected Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City, and from voters, in both red and purple districts, whose anger at President Donald Trump is matched by their impatience with the leaders of their own party and their desire to topple the status quo. Some of his allies dismiss the insurgency as a phenomenon confined to the bluest parts of America.
But few Democrats in Washington know the shape of this dynamic better than Jeffries, because he has been navigating it in his home district of Brooklyn for over a quarter of a century. The bitterness of their 2024 loss of the White House, Senate and House changed the Democratic Party, ushering in a new generation of political participants who are more populist and more grassroots than the generation before them—the generation, as it happens, to which Jeffries belongs. Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by more than 8 points in the RealClearPolling average, but Jeffries carries a negative 10-point favorability rating according to a polling aggregate compiled by RealClear Polling.
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